Publications

Report

Creative Conversations: a national study of Australian retirement living ↗

by Mia Schaumberg, Dana Dermody, Andy Ward, Daniel Wadsworth, Briony Luttrell, Alison Craswell, Christopher Askew, Nicholas Stevens, Hannah Joyce Banks, Lachlan Goold and Sarah Casey

2025

While the majority of Retirement Living (RL) residents have not yet accessed the government’s home-based care and support infrastructure, there is a growing expectation that many will require Support at Home (SAH) services in the near future. Given more than 317,000 older Australians will be living in RL communities by 2030 [3], the RL industry will have a critical role in supporting the health needs of older adults, ensuring the viability and sustainability of the aged care sector, however little is known about what this should look like in best-practice. This report aims to provide major industry operators, all tiers of government, and industrial peak bodies with meaningful data and recommendations on the future of the Australian Retirement Living Industry to ensure our nation is a world leader in the provision of housing, lifestyle, and health and wellbeing for older people. 

---

Journal article | Peer reviewed

The impacts of shock events on airport management and operations: A systematic literature review ↗

by Yue Gu, Mirjam Wiedemann, Robert Freestone, Henrik Rothe and Nicholas Stevens

2024
Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Unpredictable shock events have disruptive and long-lasting impacts on the aviation industry. However, the scale and type of impact of different shock events on airport operations and planning have been unevenly surveyed. A better understanding can help airports to improve their risk mitigation and develop more resilient operations and management. Through a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed research, we summarise shock events into four categories based on the cause of the shock: economic recessions, infectious disease pandemics, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. The major impacts are identified as a reduction in air travel demand, interruptions in operations, modified operating procedures, and changes in facilities and infrastructure. We further bring these together into a conceptual typology of event-impact interactions. This longitudinal overview may assist airport managers in better understanding the impacts of shock events and taking further steps in developing more resilient airport infrastructure and associated business models.

---

Journal article | Peer reviewed

Urban design and planning for extreme heat: an empirical study of built environment professionals’ perceptions in South East Queensland, Australia ↗

by Ryan McNeilly Smith, Silvia Tavares and Nicholas Stevens

2024
Cities & Health

Extreme heat is currently Australia’s deadliest natural hazard. The intensity of heat events is increasing due to climate change, and further exacerbated by urban heat islands. Urban design and planning solutions can assist in reducing heat-health risks, but they are rarely implemented. Through semi-structured interviews and an online survey, we investigated the role of such solutions in planning and urban design practice in South-East Queensland, Australia. The results showed planning professionals had lower awareness of the role urban design and planning played in heat mitigation and adaptation strategies compared to urban designers and architects. Continued professional development and a greater inclusion of heat mitigation design provisions in Queensland’s planning system and Australian planning education are outlined as future requirements.

---

Book chapter

Advancing Cities: Bioclimatic and Sociotechnical Understanding for Healthy Places ↗

by Silvia Tavares, Greg Mews and Nicholas Stevens

2024
ISOCARP Review 19: Towards Holistic Climate-Responsive Planning for Equitable Places and Communities

This work critically reflects on the necessity for different understanding of the contemporary urban challenges prevalent in the urban design and planning discourse. We seek to canvas a divergent pathway to embrace complexity and in doing so advance and actualise an urban design and planning paradigm shift. We reject the piecemeal and reactive practices that follow the predict and provide for the market rhetoric while envisioning the critical role of higher education within our discipline. This essay is a call for a collective realisation that we need to mainstream different ways to overcome the prevailing dissonance between intent and outcome. To enable conditions for a new ontology of practice and pedagogy of understanding in which holistic policy making and design of new urban spaces benefits all. Our BASC Lab serves as a living case study to illustrate the possibilities for approaching complex societal issues by responding to the complexities of cities and their escalating environmental, sociological, and technological entanglements, and addressing impacts on people and place now and into the future. Reflections are presented on the role of higher education to achieve an intergenerational paradigm shift where justice is served in praise of a larger ecological and regenerative systems approach to the urban condition. Here we outline collaborative efforts on bioclimatic urbanism through climate-responsiveness for all, while impacting as little as possible on the natural environment. The understanding of sociotechnical urbanism reflects on complex systems thinking for holistic decision-making and the prioritisation of health and wellbeing for just cities beyond the human domain. We conclude with an open-ended call to realise the role of our discipline and higher education sector where deeper learning, research and advocacy meet. Let us rediscover the beauty of a complex, non-linear and relational ecological awareness embedded within our professional ontology.

---

Journal article

Special Section on Health, Urban Climate and Complexity in Urban Design and Planning ↗

by Nicholas Stevens, Greg Mews and Silvia Tavares

2023
The Journal of Public Space

This journal section welcomes contributions addressing new knowledge through research, practice examples and experimentation related to public spaces for all. The section calls for contributions to a discourse within and across the nexus of:

- Urban health to enable holistic and equitable communities

- Urban climate analysis and environmental performance concerning, for example, city form, green infrastructure and human thermal comfort

- Exploring urban complexities, particularly regarding the consideration of the system-wide interdependencies of sociotechnical and socioecological relationships.

To date, there is very little discourse and research on public space undertaken from these perspectives and paradigms and their intersection. Hence, we seek contributions that embrace complexity, examine ambiguities and in-betweens, and contradictions in policies. We also welcome experimental methodologies that can have a practical impact and achieve an ontological shift towards transformative change in communities transcending the conceptual Global North and South, East and West dualism. We appreciate theoretical and practical investigations that demonstrate entanglement with multifaceted aspects ranging from visualisation, communication, or arts-based expressions. We seek to explore the environmental, social, and technical conditions that contribute to an urban climate conducive to health and well-being in the broadest sense. Selected contributions and case studies will need to demonstrate the successful application of at least two of the three focus themes. These manuscripts will allow space for discussion regarding scale-ability and practice application to achieve equitable public spaces.

---

Explore all Nicholas Stevens's publications in UniSC Research Bank

Grants

22 March 2024 - 22 March 2025

Establishing a systems understanding of the Sunshine Coast Biosphere: actors, opportunities, and impacts.

Sunshine Coast Council (Australia)
Grant no. 0980028465.

Silvia Tavares, Greg Mews and Nicholas Stevens

---

6 March 2023 - 27 September 2024

Urban microclimates of Noosa

Noosa Council
Grant no. 0980028069.

Nicholas Stevens and Silvia Tavares

---

24 June 2022 - 30 June 2024

How cool are our green urban forests?

Sunshine Coast Council (Australia)
Grant no. 0980027597.

Nicholas Stevens, Javier Leon and Silvia Tavares

---

1 January 2024

Understanding the actors, networks, and resources to optimise mixed light industrial areas for creativity, commerce, circularity, and community engagement.

University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, Sunshine Coast) - UniSC
Grant no. 0980028538.

Greg Mews, Andy Ward, Sarah Casey, Briony Luttrell and Nicholas Stevens

---

22 June 2022 - 30 January 2023

Microgrid systems research: Exploring the impacts of microgrids within fringe of, or end of grid, Indigenous communities.

PLANZ Town Planners and Community Developers
Grant no. 0980027914.

Silvia Tavares and Nicholas Stevens

---

7 December 2022

Creative Conversations

The Trustee for Keyton Management Services Trust
Grant no. 0980027506.

Briony Luttrell, Christopher Askew, Alison Craswell, Mia Schaumberg, Daniel Wadsworth, Dana Dermody, Lachlan Goold, Hannah Banks, Sarah Casey, Nicholas Stevens and Andy Ward

---

6 February 2017 - 31 December 2019

From field data to 3D visualisation: Evaluating benefits of learning experiences

University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, Sunshine Coast) - UniSC
Grant no. 0980024455.

Nicholas Stevens, Mark Barry and Javier Leon

---

1 January 2018 - 31 December 2018

Advance Award - Advancing the Student Experience

University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, Sunshine Coast) - UniSC
Grant no. 0980025230.

Gemma Read, David Lacey, Nicholas Stevens, Natassia Goode, Vanessa Beanland, Rachael Wynne, Eryn Grant, Amanda Clacy, Kerri-Anne Salmon and Paul Salmon

---

2 September 2015 - 30 September 2018

For establishing applied curricula and digital resources which prioritise student access to town planning principles, practice and projects, enabling them to 'plan for great places'

Department of Education, Employment and Training
Grant no. 0980024539.

Nicholas Stevens

---

2 February 2015 - 30 April 2018

A student-led approach to explore and implement immersive-visualisation experiences and design pedagogies across urban planning program and programs with geospatial minor

University of the Sunshine Coast (Australia, Sunshine Coast) - UniSC
Grant no. 0980023247.

Johanna Rosier, Claudia Baldwin, Nicholas Stevens, Wendy Chalmers and Sanjeev Srivastava

---

Explore all Nicholas Stevens's grants in UniSC Research Bank

Supervision

Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

Toward a unified set of accident causation tenets: identification, application and implications ↗

Students: Eryn Grant

Associated Researchers: Paul Salmon and Nicholas Stevens

2015 - 2020

Whilst accident analysis is an accepted approach to safety management, it is reactive in nature and requires the occurrence of adverse events. A proactive approach to safety can be achieved by monitoring "normal performance"; however, there are few theories or methods in safety science that provide specific support on the identification of the conditions that could create accidents and safety compromising events. The research presented in this thesis is a response to this capability gap and aimed to use what is known about accident causation to identify a series of 'tenets' or principal beliefs regarding safety and accidents that could be examined in order to proactively assess the safety status of complex work systems.

---

Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

Understanding the neighbourhood attributes which best support independent living opportunities for adults with intellectual disability ↗

Students: Catherine MacMillan

Associated Researchers: Nicholas Stevens

2015 - 2019

This research examined the neighbourhood as a system for identifying and understanding the attributes that would support independent living opportunities for adults with an intellectual disability. Neighbourhood attributes such as roads, seats, parks and facilities influence how people live in an urban designed space. The research developed an understanding of how the neighbourhood attributes may or may not support these adults, who can and want to live away from the family home, in a regular house in a regular street. While choosing where to live is an important decision for anybody, the decision is more complex for adults with intellectual disability. As the longevity of adults with intellectual disability increases many of these adults will continue to outlive their parents and carers. This research, after identifying a gap in current urban planning research, investigated how various combinations of neighbourhood attributes provided opportunities for independently living for adults with intellectual disability. This research examined how attributes, if included or omitted from a neighbourhood might impact on independent living opportunities for the target group. This research excluded other factors such as levels of support and funding which also impact on independent living opportunities.

---

Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

A Sociotechnical Systems Approach to the Design of Main Streets ↗

Students: Nicholas Patorniti

Associated Researchers: Nicholas Stevens and Paul Salmon

2016 - 2019

This research contends that current approaches to the design of cities (city design) need improvement. They are contributing to undesirable cities that are adversely affecting many facets of modern society (e.g., people, economy, culture and the environment). The need to accommodate an urbanising world population is presenting many challenges to current city design approaches, yet also many opportunities to optimise cities through their redevelopment. Sociotechnical systems theory and methods have been used to understand and respond to complexity in other domains but have not yet been comprehensively applied to city design. A gap is also evident in sociotechnical system method outputs and their ability to inform design processes. Sociotechnical systems are taken as the theoretical foundation for the thesis, while cognitive work analysis (CWA) with object worlds, social network analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) provide the methodological and analytic study approach. Using main streets as an archetype complex urban system, the overall aim of the research undertaken as part of this thesis was to explore the usefulness of a sociotechnical systems approach to city design.

---

Doctoral Thesis Supervision - Completed

Testing and Measuring Teamwork and Distributed Situation Awareness in Australian Rules Football Field Umpiring Teams

Students: Timothy Neville

Associated Researchers: Paul Salmon, Gemma Read and Nicholas Stevens

2014 - 2018